


couples-only dance, prom night

by 24parts



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Middle School, Elementary School, M/M, One Shot Collection, Slow To Update
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-08-24 21:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16648034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/24parts/pseuds/24parts
Summary: a collection of one-shots, various pairings.(whether i'll ever actually write a prom chapter remains to be seen)





	1. basketball game tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rating: G  
> tags: stan/kyle, middle school au, slice of life, fluff

   Kyle showed up unannounced after dinner, which was only a little unusual for him. Stan was the one who answered the door, and over his left shoulder Kyle could see his parents at the kitchen sink, still washing the dishes, and Shelly on the couch, watching the TV.

   "Dude," Stan said. He raised his eyebrows, and leaned heavy on the doorframe. "Is this about the game?"

   "Yeah. And I know anxiety is your thing," Kyle began, though he had no idea where he planned to go from there. His hands were buried deep in his coat pockets, trembling. He could feel snow melting in his hair.

   "I never, like, claimed anxiety," Stan said, and then stepped aside, holding the door open.

   Upstairs, in Stan's room, Kyle starfished on the bed while Stan went about tidying up, sheepishly, as if Kyle might possibly give a shit that Stan left dishes laying around for days on end, and seemed averse to putting empty soda cans into the trash, though the wastebasket was right there, on the other side of the nightstand. As if Kyle wouldn't be used to it by now.

   "I fucking hate basketball," Kyle said to the ceiling. "I hate it and I think I'm going to quit."

   "You don't hate it," Stan told him distractedly. Kyle glanced over, and saw that he was standing there with his arms full of dirty laundry he'd picked up from the floor. As Kyle watched, he opened his closet and dumped it all inside without ceremony, then kicked the pile for good measure before closing the door on it.

   "Don't tell me what I hate and don't hate," Kyle said, shifting up onto his elbows. "You wouldn't put up with it, if you were me."

   "With what?"

   Kyle grimaced. "Being the worst."

   And that was saying something. Park County Middle School's basketball team had an all-inclusive, accept-everyone policy, mostly because so few people wanted to join. There was no glamour in it. Most of the school's sports funding was monopolized by football, so luxuries like varsity jackets and customised uniforms were out of the question. All Kyle had to show for his countless hours of practice was a twice-broken nose and a jersey permanently stained with other people's sweat. They had never won a game, and Kyle was pretty sure they were not about to start.

   He rolled over and curled up, facing away. His stomach was churning in the worst way, and for a moment he thought he might just throw up down the gap between Stan's bed and the wall. To ground himself, the gazed into it: the abyss. There was a sock, and dust, and what looked like an old Nintendo cartridge. Kyle wanted to wedge himself down there as well, to hide in the dark for as long as he could get away with it.

   "Dude, are you kidding?" Stan asked. Kyle heard him pad across the carpet, and then the mattress dipped suddenly with the weight of him as he crawled onto it, on his hands and knees. Kyle's stomach lurched in a different way, this time. "South Park was always the worst. At, like, everything."

   "Elementary school doesn't count," Kyle pointed out.

   "If you say so."

   Silence fell. Kyle could hear the TV downstairs, and Stan's parents bickering over the top of it. He reached out and touched the wall, which was cool, though the room was warm. There were hard little bubbles in the paint. He closed his eyes, breathing deep to try to calm his heart rate. It didn't work, and god, it had been a long time since Kyle had longed for nothing more than to skip school, even for just one day. It had been years.

   "I just want to stay here," he said, and turned onto his front, his face entirely buried in Stan's pillow. The smell was familiar, Stan's shampoo, and more comforting than it should have been. Kyle stretched his legs out and felt his foot nudge against Stan's leg. Muffled, and feeling strangely on the verge of tears, he added, "Please?"

   Stan hesitated. "I mean, yeah. Until your mom calls."

   "Can't you hide me in the treehouse or something?" Kyle said, begging now. He felt the mattress shift again, weight moving; then Stan was lying alongside him, sharing the pillow. He sighed as he lay down, and Kyle peeked out from where he'd been hiding his face in the crook of his elbow. "Don't look at me like that, dude," he said.

   "It's just that I've never seen you so, like..." Stan was frowning. He looked more than concerned: he looked about as afraid as Kyle felt. "...clammy, and everything?" 

   As though without thinking, he reached out with one hand and touched Kyle's cheek. Kyle, for his part, stopped breathing altogether.

   "Yeah." He swallowed, pulling himself together. "I kind of wish I could die for a while."

   Stan raised his eyebrows. "For a while?"

   "Like how, uh, in the Bible, Jesus dies and comes back three days later, or whatever? That would be ideal."

   "I know what you mean," Stan said. He cracked a smile, but took his hand away.

   Kyle shook his head. "Sorry. I know I'm being dumb. I'll go, I just..." He trailed off, too hopeless and heavy to continue. He would go: he just didn't want to. He would go: he just would rather do literally anything else. 

   He closed his eyes. Stan's sheets were so much softer than his own, easier to sink into. Probably they weren't washed as often. Strangely, Kyle didn't mind. He was pretty sure he'd be back here at this time tomorrow, complaining at length about how the game had gone, thinking again about Stan's sheets, burying his face in them...

   "Are you going?" he asked, abruptly. The whole time, he'd been imagining the stands full of nameless, faceless people. The idea that Stan might show up was horrifying, in a way, but then again...

   "Yeah, of course I'm going. And I'll be cheering for you," Stan said, so earnestly that Kyle snorted.

   "Dude, don't cheer for me."

   "Why?"

   "Because it'll be embarrassing for you when I screw everything up." Kyle wrinkled his nose. "You'll be the guy who cheered for me."

   Stan hesitated for just a moment, and Kyle watched almost in awe as he licked his bottom lip unconsciously, thinking. Then his eyes flicked back to Kyle's again. "What if I want to be that guy?"

   "Well, you shouldn't." Kyle felt his cheeks go hot, but he managed a sort of self-deprecating laugh. It came out sounding sort of choked, though Stan didn't seem to notice. "What does that even mean?"

   "I don't know." Stan rolled onto his back, clasping his hands over his stomach. "I guess I don't know what it means."

   Kyle's mouth felt dry. Stan was staring at the ceiling, which give him free reign to look: his gaze wandered over Stan's neck, his eyelashes, the slope of his nose. Even after all these years, Kyle wasn't tired of looking. He squeezed his eyes shut. At their shoulders, they were almost touching. Somewhere along the line it had started to matter, he had started to notice...

   Kyle sat up, and Stan titled his head back to look at him.

   "What?" he said.

   "Nothing," Kyle said, automatically. He felt queasy all of a sudden, and he wanted to leave. But he also wanted to stay. Breathing out slowly, he shook his head. "Just. I think I might know what it means... maybe."

   "Yeah," Stan said. "Me too." He was speaking very softly, watching Kyle so intently, and Kyle imagined that he could hear Stan's heartbeat pounding, though it was really just his own.


	2. back at it again at krispy kreme

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rating: T  
> tags: craig&clyde, college au, slice of life

   Clyde had been sixteen years old when he started working at the Krispy Kreme in the South Park mall. The concept, the plan, had been to save up for a car, but after two full summers there his total savings equalled twenty dollars and he still had a learner's permit, and everything seemed to be going mostly wrong in his life anyway.

   By his eighteenth birthday, he was still a virgin, his dad had just gotten remarried to a bona fide succubus, and his friends would discuss nothing except their various college applications and the status thereof. Craig, in particular, had developed a mild obsession with some eclectic school on the East Coast, where he was going to become a theatre major. This was annoying to Clyde on a visceral level, because Craig did not act, or sing, or dance, or enjoy musicals, or do anything else that theatre majors were supposed to do, and yet they had accepted him in based solely on his SAT scores and a tenth-grade co-directing credit in a school production of /Oliver Twist/. Clyde, by the end of senior year, had scraped his graduating credits so narrowly that he hadn't even bothered applying anywhere. And after all that, he simply could not stand the thought of another summer working at the fucking Krispy Kreme.

   But as it turned out, having no summer job only meant that he spent several months doing nothing but playing video games and jerking off, which left him feeling somehow even more empty when all of his friends had packed their bags and left for their respective colleges. He was also completely broke, as well as burdened with a sense of vague disapproval from his father, who had perhaps once been proud of him.

   Applying for a full-time position was an embarrassing, but surprisingly successful, endeavour. In Clyde's mind, he had been an ungrateful asshole who'd walked out on a job that wasn't even really that bad: but to the manager, apparently, he was a great candidate with a solid six months of experience not just in retail, but in the exact same god damn Krispy Kreme in which he was applying to work for a second time.

   By mid-November, Clyde had been taken aside and quite unceremoniously granted an assistant-managerial position, along with a set of keys. These came with strict instructions to lock the place up at six pm and no exceptions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he would be the last person in the store. Clyde didn't know why this was so important, exactly, but it meant that that when Craig Tucker showed up unannounced one night at closing time, demanding three lemon meringue doughnuts and a chocolate shake, Clyde had no choice but to take the shutters down half-way and lock the two of them inside.

   "You're lucky I'm the one who was here," Clyde told him as he set the tray down on the counter. By the look Craig gave him, Clyde could tell that it had been a stupid thing to say.  

   He didn't know why Craig would come to Krispy Kreme, of all places, except for the obvious: that he was hungry, and wanted doughnuts in particular for some reason. It was still term-time, and by all accounts Craig should've been up in New England, where he now belonged. Clyde had barely heard from him since he had left. Token and Jimmy at least made the effort to call sometimes: Craig had sent a total of one text, a month ago, which had been very long and riddled with typos, obviously written drunk. Clyde had been disturbed by its contents, and hadn't replied. Now, looking at Craig up-close, he was starting to think maybe he should have.

   "If you weren't here, I would've just left," Craig said. He was leaning on the counter with his full weight, his arms crossed, staring down at his three doughnuts as though contemplating them. Probably he was just trying to decide which to eat first, even though they were all the same. "Did you know I was in town?" he asked, very casually, as he selected the middle one and reached for it.

   "Yes," Clyde said. He went about putting away the milk cartons as he explained, "Don't pretend like I don't live next door to you. You woke me up at 3am when you were arguing with your Uber driver or whatever in the street." He paused. "Though, when I woke up today I thought maybe it was just a weird dream."

   "Oh," Craig said.

   Clyde shrugged, and kept his back to the counter. He was now busy washing out the blender which had, in fact, been clean in the first place, before Craig showed up, but that was life and sometimes you just had to deal with it. Clyde was dealing with it. Craig, sitting there eating his prissy little over-priced factory doughnuts, had no idea just how well he was dealing with it.

   And how could he? He had only texted once.

   Even then, sometimes Clyde wondered if the text had really been for him. Craig wasn't one for oversharing: his inner life was a mystery to most people, or at least to Clyde, who had always felt sort of deprived because of this. He'd found out that Craig was gay through the grapevine, a rumour that was never dispelled or corrected and had somehow formed into gospel truth by the time they were in the fifth grade. Then, a month ago and via text, he had found out Craig had drunkenly lost his virginity to a classmate at college, and regretted it so strongly that he'd composed an entire tirade about how he hated sex, and the classmate, and New Hampshire, and himself. In Clyde's opinion, that sort of thing was at least worth a phone call -- and Clyde had assured himself that he /would/ call, that he would speak to Craig as soon as he came up with the right thing to say.

   Now it was November, and Clyde still hadn't thought of anything. He looked back over his shoulder, wondering if Craig was watching him.

   He was, and the corner of his lip twitched up, almost in a smile. "How are things at Dunkin' Donuts?" he asked, before thoughtlessly licking away a smear of lemon filling from the side of his finger.

   Clyde wanted to roll his eyes, but didn't. "I'm actually assistant manager now," he said, turning around. He tapped his badge, before he remembered it didn't say anything on it except his first name.

   Craig looked at the badge for longer than it took him to read it. "That explains why you're serving illicit milkshakes to me," he said, glancing up at Clyde for only a moment before focusing again on his food. It was only when Clyde returned to the sink that he added, "It's not that I don't appreciate it."

   "I know," Clyde said, as he set about putting away the equipment he'd used. He could feel Craig's eyes on him whenever his back was turned, and the pressure -- all the things he'd ever thought about saying to Craig were building up, on the tip of his tongue, but what ended up coming out was, "When are you going back to school?"

   Craig shrugged. "Whenever."

   "Well, there must be kind of a time limit."

   Craig was staring down at the two remaining doughnuts as though they suddenly repulsed him. "Can I get these in a to-go bag, or something?" he asked.

   "I can give you a box," Clyde said, warily. Everything about Craig's body language had changed in a heartbeat, and his tension was contagious. "But you better finish that shake."

   Craig narrowed his eyes at him. Then he leaned forward, took the straw into his mouth, and spent several long seconds swallowing down the entire milkshake as Clyde watched him, feeling mildly disgusted, mildly sympathetic.

   "Try not to throw up on the way home," he said when Craig was done, and had straightened up again, not quite as composed as he had been before.

   "Don't tell me what to do," Craig retorted, already leaving. He reached the door in a few strides and yanked on the handle, but it didn't budge. He turned on his heel, and glared at Clyde as though this had been a deliberate offence on his part.

   "You're being really mean to me," Clyde pointed out, opting not to move from behind the counter. Part of him was afraid that Craig might throw the box of doughnuts at him if he got any closer. Another, more insistent part of him knew that Craig wouldn't, if only because he had paid for them.

   "Well," Craig said, as if this meant anything.

   Clyde crossed his arms. "Well, what?"

   "If I wanted to be really mean, I'd be ripping on you for working at Tim Horton's," Craig said, so matter-of-factly that Clyde felt himself bracing for an explosion, though Craig continued in an even tone, "And I'm not. You're assistant manager now. I think that's really great."

   Clyde took the keys from his pocket and walked over, sighing. "It's actually a Krispy Kreme," he said, as Craig stepped out of the way of the door, letting Clyde unlock it and then haul the shutter up.

   "I know it is," Craig said, and left. 


	3. i smell like beef

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> rating: T  
> tags: stan/kyle, high school au, slice of life, fluff, humour

   Kyle stalks out into the street at twelve o'clock on the dot, and all but rips the Cartman Burger visor from his head so that he doesn't have to confront Stan while wearing it.

   "You need to fuck off," Kyle tells him, managing somehow to use his indoor voice even though he's spent the last three hours fuming behind the register, watching through the glass panel windows as Stan marched back and forth, holding his insufferable sign which says, **CARTMAN BURGER - SLAUGHTERING MANATEES SINCE 2011.** Kyle hates the sign, hates that it's become Stan's place to go around telling people what they should and shouldn't slaughter, and especially hates the way that Stan proceeds to turn around with an expression on his face like he has no idea why Kyle is standing there, speaking to him. This is despite the fact that they've gone through this spectacle at least a dozen times since the start of summer vacation, when Stan became the lackey of some Vegan Society based in Denver, and Kyle took up his old position at the Cartman Burger, where he now has to take on all kinds of menial tasks, such as dealing with the frequent nuisance that Stan has become. "You're seriously scaring people away with this manatee stuff, dude."

   "Why do you care?" Stan asks. He puts the sign on the ground and leans on the post of it, as if this conversation is serving as an excuse for him to take a break. "You still get paid. It's not like people tip you."

   Kyle rolls his eyes. He had shared this factoid with Stan weeks ago, in one of his many bitter rants about his job. Probably it had been an aside, thrown in somewhere between tirades about his incompetent manager and the malfunctioning shake machine, which still hasn't been fixed. Cartman Burger is, in essence, a circle of hell, but summer jobs in South Park are a hot commodity, and Kyle has connections here. Or just the one connection, really, which is that on Kyle's sixteenth birthday, Cartman called him up from HQ in Fresno and personally offered him his old job back, flipping burgers at the illustrious South Park branch of what is now a multi-million dollar burger empire.

   He looks back at said South Park branch, dismayed by the sight of it. It's clean inside, spotless -- definitely cleaner than it was before Kyle was hired, though he's under no illusion that Cartman wanted him back because of his skills, or even out of charity. It was a power play, and Kyle went along with it solely because he wanted the money. He's been trying to get a head start on his savings, to scrounge together enough to put a dent in the student loans he'll have to deal with in a couple of years. Kyle wants to be a surgeon, and he had once reasoned that working around meat all day might help him desensitise him to viscera, until he found out that the burgers come frozen, as disks, and they don't bleed on the grill, ever.

   "I'll care when they cut my hours because the place is fucking empty," he says, his eyes sweeping all of those tables, mirror-shiny and unoccupied. "Can you please just go protest somewhere else?" Kyle checks his watch, pointlessly: he checked it five minutes ago, and every five minutes before that. It's a habit he's developed, working here. "Please, dude. It's almost lunch rush."

   "Kyle-- come on." If Stan is sympathetic at all, it doesn't stop him picking the sign up and adjusting it so that the text side faces the road, alerting all passing drivers that Cartman Burger has, in fact, been slaughtering manatees since 2011. "People have to know what they're really eating."

   "I wish I didn't," Kyle says, crossing his arms and eyeing the sign with every ounce of the disgust that he feels towards it.

   "Then maybe you should write to the USDA."

   "You know I can't write to the fucking USDA!"

   "And you know I can't not protest here." Stan shakes his head. "It was hard enough getting the Corrections people to count this stuff as community service, dude. I'm screwed if I just stop showing up."

   Kyle has to stop himself physically recoiling at that word: _corrections_. There might have been a time, when he was younger, that he would've been charmed by the idea that Stan was a troublemaker, or even the truth of the matter, which is that he was caught 'liberating' cows again and got landed with a hundred hours of community service for his trouble. Kyle can't find it charming at all, now that he knows what something like that can do to college applications. Not that this affects Kyle, exactly, but he's serious enough about Stan that his hardships feel like something they're sharing, and this will include the gruelling two years that Stan will have to live with his juvenile arrest record before it's sealed away for good. The less people know about it in the mean time, Kyle thinks, the better. 

   "Alright, fine," he says, annoyed, and even moreso when Stan smiles at him, that tender baby-cow-rescuer smile which made Kyle fall in love with him somewhere down the line, though he can't remember when. "Do your dumb protest," he says, turning to leave, yanking open the front door. Over his shoulder, he says, "I'll see you later."

  
-v-

  
   Stan keeps working through the lunch rush, though he's hungry, not exactly put off by the weird grill-smoke smell which wafts out of Cartman Burger whenever somebody opens the door. Kyle loves to exaggerate: Stan has managed to deter maybe two or three people today so far, mostly due to the withering, judgemental looks he gives to anybody who looks at his sign and then proceeds to take another step closer to the restaurant. Most of them just keep walking, and come out five minutes later with with a grease-stained bag, avoiding eye contact.

   Stan tries to avoid eye contact too, not with customers but with Kyle, who has been on the register all day and is driving him sort of insane. When Kyle isn't serving anybody, he just stands there, all angular and uniformed and flushed with the summer heat, gazing out of the front window like he's daydreaming. Stan wants to rescue him, perhaps even more than he wants to rescue the manatees being horrifically abused: the /other/ victims of Cartman's tyranny.

   By two o'clock, Stan is starving, and he has to drag the protest sign with him all the way to Cafe Monet, which is a block away and more crowded than Cartman Burger was when he left. Stan sees this as a small victory for himself, even as the patrons stare at him as he approaches the counter. It's July, and he's a little sweaty, his hands damp and fumbling as he counts the change to pay for two to-go sandwiches, which come artistically wrapped in brown paper and then tucked into a re-usable bag which fits them perfectly. Stan struggles to balance the sign against his leg as he tries to take the bag and put his wallet away at the same time.

   "Cartman Burger  _slaughters_ manatees?" someone says in a hushed voice, from one of the tables, but Stan doesn't have time to stop and chat with them about it.

   When he makes it back to Cartman Burger, Kyle is already waiting for him, sitting on the sidewalk out front and scrolling on his phone. He's still dressed in his apron and his visor, which is always slipping down onto his forehead, fighting his hair for dominance and losing. He looks up as Stan approaches, and he doesn't smile.

   "How's it going?" Stan asks, sitting down beside him and tossing one of the sandwiches into his lap. He leaves the sign on the ground, text-side down, hoping Kyle wont give him shit for it twice in one day.

   "I'm beef," Kyle replies simply, as if this is a normal answer, and Stan stops halfway through unwrapping his sandwich to eye him.

   "You're beef?"

   Kyle nods. "I smell like beef. I feel like beef," he says, and brings one hand up to wipe at his cheek, close to his nose, where he's forever complaining about the state of his pores or whatever. Stan hasn't noticed anything wrong with Kyle's complexion. He /has/ noticed the vaguely charcoal-ish infusion which clings to him at the end of the day, though he knows better than to mention it as Kyle continues, "I pretty much have become beef, Stan. I'm bacon grease. I'm the human incarnation of that fucking plastic cheese."

   "You're losing it, dude," Stan tells him, unwrapping his sandwich fully. Then he takes the sandwich from Kyle's lap and swaps it with the unwrapped one, still nestled in the paper, to save him the effort. "I saw you. You weren't even working the grill today, you were on the register."

   "It doesn't matter," Kyle says. He leans his head back against the wall, staring at the overhang, the drainpipe which snakes its way up and around. "It's all the same in there. It's fucking disgusting."

   Stan can't deny that. He was grossed out by Cartman Burger the first time around, when it was a street-food scheme run by a bunch of kids, before Cartman managed to save up enough to start renting out the old KFC building, hiring actual cooks, and applying hygiene standards. Then the rumours started swirling about the manatee thing. The allegation is that the animals are harvested somewhere in the Caribbean, and that their skin is dried, ground up, and made into an unlisted ingredient of the spice blend which is then applied to the patties at a factory level, and from there, distributed to each of the one hundred and twelve Cartman Burger locations in the United States. It's crazy and largely unsubstantiated, but also probably true. Stan is unaffected by it, having never been a Cartman Burger customer in the first place, but Kyle has been waiving his free lunch privileges ever since Stan told him about the protests. In between two shifts of burger-flipping, the vegan special at Cafe Monet is all he can stomach, and Stan has brought him one every workday of summer vacation so far, figuring it's the least he can do while he's spending the rest of his time out in front of Kyle's workplace, bothering him and everyone else.

   "Maybe I should stop eating meat," Kyle says, lifting up the top slice of ciabatta to peer inside of his sandwich. It's filled with spinach, red onion, roasted bell pepper, and a dairy-free pesto dressing: Stan's favourite.

   Stan glances over at him. "Are you serious?"

   "Why wouldn't I be serious?"

   "Because, it's you," Stan says, shifting his leg so that he can bump his knee against Kyle's. "You've always been really fussy about what you eat."

   Kyle rolls his eyes. "Don't call me fussy," he says, though he undeniably is. They sit and eat for a while, and Stan can't help watching him, wondering what he's thinking about. Probably not animal rights, which is fine: Stan has never cared that Kyle has other priorities, thought he is convinced that both of their lives would be easier if Kyle didn't work here, at Cartman Burger. As if it would really be that hard for him to get a summer job someplace else. Stan couldn't, with his record, but Kyle is a straight-A overachiever with service experience and impeccable timekeeping, a reputation unscathed by clandestine cow-smuggling operations. Stan considers bringing this up, but is spared by Kyle saying out of nowhere, "This has been the longest summer ever."

   Stan stretches his legs out in front of himself fully, considering this. The reason his summer has been so long, he thinks, isn't because of the hearings or the community service but because of Kyle, and the way that every day seems to begin a new chapter for the two of them, always a new development. New kisses, late-night phone calls. New traditions. Kyle has said before that they're 'getting serious', though Stan has never understood why. His whole life, he's never been anything but serious about Kyle.

   "Would you rather pause time right now," Stan asks as the thought occurs to him, "or fast forward?"

   "I don't know. Fast forward I guess," Kyle says, scrunching up his sandwich wrapper. Stan thinks about saving his, though he doesn't know what for. The people he's working for are big into zero waste, that whole movement, but Stan is not yet able to commit to the idea of making a patchwork quilt out of his saved sandwich papers, or whatever, so he balls his up too. Kyle sighs, crossing his arms. "Dude, sometimes it's really hard to believe in life after South Park."

   "I know." Stan can barely even imagine life after sophomore year: just August feels insurmountable enough. It will get hotter, hazier. Stan will spend more afternoons here, protesting, eating lunch. Kyle next to him, complaining. He closes his eyes, and sees a dim pink light. "I don't know where I'd end up if I fast-forwarded, is the thing," he admits.

   "What are you imagining?" Kyle asks.

   "Staying here forever."

   Stan doesn't have to look at Kyle to see the horror on his face: he can imagine it so vividly, and his voice is tight when he asks, "Why would you?"

   "Because I'm not you. I'm not this special genius overachiever who's going to get like, a hundred scholarships and go to medical school." He pauses before admitting, "I think I kind of belong here. Even though I don't-- want to, exactly."

   "You feel like you  _belong_  here?"

   "I'm the embodiment of here, dude," Stan tells him. "I mean, I stole cows. Twice. That's the most South Park thing ever."

   "Well, it's not like you wanted to keep them," Kyle says, as if this is the deciding factor of the whole thing.

   Stan has to concede: he didn't want to keep them. He wanted them to run and be free. He had been drunk, of course, and also dealing with a weird upswing after a bad couple of months, mental-health wise, which he'd spent in a funk of all-consuming hopelessness before coming to the stunning realisation that he should probably devote the rest of his life to the only thing he ever really gave a shit about: animals, and the act of saving them. In that moment, he had been sure nothing in life would bring him more joy than watching a herd of cows take off into the night. It had turned out, though, that cows really had no desire to do such a thing. They had simply stood there and watched motionlessly as he was arrested, and that was why, in the end, Stan had decided to go with the less dramatic but infinitely more realistic option of adopting a plant-based diet.

   "So you'd pause time?" Kyle asks, and when he turns his head to look at Stan, his cheek is almost touching Stan's shoulder. Stan wishes he would lay it there, like he does sometimes, but there's about a zero percent chance of Kyle doing so here, in the middle of the street. Townspeople are walking by at intervals, stepping over Stan's sign more deliberately than they have to.

   "No," Stan says. He counts down every hour of community service, the way he knows Kyle does with every hour at this job. The ratio is off, not ideal, and like all summers, time is distorted beyond recognition. Pausing here would be trapping himself in limbo forever, the liminal space to end all liminal spaces. "I guess not."

   "Well, then let's hope we get to fast-forward though this part," Kyle says. He's slipping his phone into his pocket and then readjusting his visor, brushing off his apron. His fifteen-minute lunch break must be just about over.

   "Not this part," Stan corrects him. "The part starting like two minutes from now, though."

   "Right," Kyle agrees as he gets to his feet. Stan stays sitting, looking up at him until Kyle offers his hand. Stan doesn't need the help getting up, but he takes it anyway, just to savour the feeling of Kyle's warm, overheated palm sliding against his for one precious moment before they have to let go. Kyle glances into the restaurant again, past their blurred reflections in the front window, and sighs at the sight of his own empty register. "Someday, when I'm a surgeon, I'm going to tell everybody in the break room about the time I worked for Cartman Burger during the Manatee Protests, and they wont fucking believe it."

   "That's the kind of thing you fantasise about?" Stan asks as he picks up his sign again, shouldering it with some effort.

   "Yeah, it is," Kyle says, and the expression on his face is strange: almost sad, almost annoyed, still staring at the counter he's about to return to. But then it passes, and he looks to Stan again, seemingly searching for something to say.

   "I'll see you later," Stan says, to save him the trouble.

   "Yeah," Kyle nods, maybe uplifted by this promise. He flashes one of his rare smiles as he opens the front door. "Later."


End file.
